Eyesight - Steven Stucky - performed by Octarium

Steven Stucky - 1949-2009
Eyesight
It was May before my
attention came
to spring and
my word I said
to the southern slopes
I've
missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:
don't worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if
you can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountain
it's not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone
text by A.R. Ammons (1926-2001)
From the liner notes of Modern Masters (2009)
"This piece has an odd history. A few years ago, I agreed to be one of the “prizes” in an auction to benefit Chorus America: the highest bidder would get a new piece from me, while their money went to the organization. The winning bid came from a collection of several professional choruses and directors. But I was always a little vague about the details, and, hearing nothing more about it for a few years, forgot the whole thing.
One day I had a message from Thomas Edward Morgan, director of the Ars Nova Chamber Singers in Boulder: they had scheduled the premiere of my new piece for a few weeks later, and could they have the music, please? I needed a text, quickly, and (as usual) I was in an LA hotel room, not at home with my books. So I turned to the Internet and soon tracked down my favorite poet, A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). Once I stumbled on “Eyesight” online, I remembered having loved the poem years before. Archie must have loved it, too, because he included it both in his Collected Poems 1951-1971 and in the later Selected Poems. It has everything you want in an Archie Ammons poem: what Edward Hirsch called his “offbeat, sideways, unpredictable radiance,” his “homespun glory.” It has one of his trademark conversations with a mountain (perhaps from his native North Carolina), it has the fluid motion from one line to the next (enjambment, if you want to get technical) that won’t let him or his reader rest till the very last word of the very last line, and it has in that last line one of those sudden insights that leave us breathless: “some things that go are gone.”
I miss Archie, but he’s not gone. I’m grateful for the wonderful poems he left us, and I’m grateful that he was always generous and kind when I had the chutzpah to add my music to his." -- Steven Stucky, August 2009

[@tomfuller5585]

I was in orchestra with Steven, in junior high, in Abilene, Texas. He played the viola, and was a lot better than all the rest of us, put together. A very serious musician, even back then.

[@vbjanzen]

1949-2009? He died in 2016, correct?

[@mfrmll3786]

.............i'm SO SORRY mom....................